


A flowery band to bind us to the earth

by lowriseflare, threeguesses



Category: When Calls the Heart (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-17
Updated: 2016-05-17
Packaged: 2018-06-09 00:00:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6880885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lowriseflare/pseuds/lowriseflare, https://archiveofourown.org/users/threeguesses/pseuds/threeguesses
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-3.08, Prayers From The Heart. Jack recovers. Elizabeth keeps sharing his bed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A flowery band to bind us to the earth

**Author's Note:**

> "He almost _died_ ," lowriseflare kept saying. "Probably they got up to _something_ in that sickroom." 
> 
> Title is Keats, _A Thing of Beauty._

Once Jack is awake—once Faith and Charlotte and Abigail have been called and gone away again, once they’ve all fussed and prodded and cried—Elizabeth curls up at the foot of his bed like a housecat and falls into a deep, exhausted sleep.

It’s still dark when she wakes up, disoriented, her hair in a tangled nest down her back. Jack is asleep again, his body a warm, solid mass on the mattress and his face slack and calm. Elizabeth’s first coherent thought is that it must be a breach of etiquette, to be here with him like this now that he’s no longer in such terrible danger.

Jack stirs as she’s easing herself to the floor, his head coming up off the pillow. “’Lizabeth?”

“Here,” she whispers, feeling like one of her students at roll call, feeling like she should stand up beside the bed and be counted. _Present_ , she thinks inanely. _I stayed, I am present_. “Hush. Go back to sleep.”

“Wait.” She watches as he swims to full consciousness, struggling to shift onto his elbows. “Where are you going?”

Where is she going? Elizabeth pauses, still half-perched on the foot of the bed like a golem. “Nowhere,” she whispers. “The other bed.” It occurs to her to wonder if perhaps _he_ cares about propriety, about being in this room together with a closed door. He’s always been so much shyer than her. “Or I could leave if you preferred. You need the rest.”

Jack sits up for real then, supporting himself on one shaky arm. “No, don’t,” he says, no longer whispering. “Please.”

He’s reaching for her. Elizabeth thinks he probably just means to take her hand but she gives him her whole self instead, scooting up the mattress so she can lean into him. He lays back down again under her weight. “I’ll stay,” she says, pressing her face against his neck. She wants to chain herself to the bed to prove it, she wants to carve it on her arm in blood. “I promise.”

After a while, Jack sleeps again. Elizabeth curls herself at the end of the bed again and watches.

 

Abigail wakes them with a knock in the morning and then doesn’t come inside, speaking to them through the door as if they were a married couple. “I’ll bring breakfast by in a spell,” she calls, and a moment later they hear the sound of her feet on the stairs, clattering away busily. Elizabeth doesn't know if she's offended by the assumption that they may need a minute to compose themselves or not.

“Good morning,” she tells Jack, pushing herself up onto her elbows. “How are you feeling?”

Jack coughs, sitting up himself. “Better.”

She can tell that he’s trying to convince her, but something about the soft rattle in his breathing suggests it might not be entirely true. He’s got so much less _colour_ than normal too, bluish rings under his eyes and his lovely red mouth gone pale and waxy. Elizabeth closes her eyes against the memory of his good strong body crumpled at the bottom of that embankment, her heart stopped cold as a glacier and just as still.

When she opens them again Jack is gazing at her from across the bed. “Don’t stare,” she chides softly, suddenly shy. She’s never woken up in the same room—in the same _bed_ —as a man before. “I look a fright.”

“You look beautiful,” Jack says calmly, leaning his head back on the pillows and closing his eyes like it’s just plain truth and not a compliment. Elizabeth has no idea why that of all things is what makes her want to cry.  
  
Abigail brings a tray in a few minutes later, tea and oatmeal. Jack’s already asleep again, his handsome face gone vulnerable and slack. There’s no school today, the church full of miners and the cafe full of townspeople and the saloon full to bursting with the overflow from the other two; the noise drifting up through the open door sets Elizabeth’s nerves jangling, like Rosemary was right about bringing the circus to town.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers to Abigail, taking the proffered cup and saucer. “I’m sure you could use some help down there.”

But Abigail shakes her head. “I’ve got Charlotte for that,” she says cheerfully. “You stay right where you are.”

So. Elizabeth stays.

 

Faith drops by in the early afternoon to check on Jack, a bustle of skirts and officiousness and instructions about liquid intake. Elizabeth has washed her face and hands in the washbin by then, and borrowed a clean dress from Abigail, but the sight of Faith’s bright cheeks and neat hair still makes her feel like a gorgon. She hovers by the end of the bed uselessly, trying not to wring her hands.

“Well, you’re looking better,” Faith tells Jack, even though Elizabeth doesn’t think he looks much better at all. “We’re out of the woods, I believe. He should probably be bathed, though,” she adds, glancing over her shoulder at Elizabeth. “It would help with the fever. I could fetch a basin, unless you’d prefer—”

“No, thank you,” Elizabeth says without even thinking about it. “It’s quite all right, I’m sure we can manage.”

“If you’re sure,” Faith says primly, looking back and forth between the two of them. Elizabeth bites her tongue. They _should_ have a chaperone, Faith is correct, but Elizabeth doesn’t want to share this, Jack and his pale vulnerable face and his exhaustion, how he can barely stay awake for more than a few hours at a time. It would feel like an invasion of his privacy.

“Are you certain?” Jack asks hoarsely once they’re alone. He’s been losing his voice on and off all day between coughing bouts. “I can bathe myself, Elizabeth, you don’t have to stay.”

“You can hardly lift your head,” Elizabeth murmurs. “It’s all right, I simply won’t—” She stops, flushing. It’s just Jack, she reminds herself. “I simply won’t bathe _all_ of you.”

Jack laughs at that, a quiet sound that rattles all through his chest. “What a relief.”

“Oh, shush,” Elizabeth says, turning her face to hide the fact that she’s blushing. She fetches a basin and a clean, soft cloth. She pauses by the door of the bedroom for a moment, debating, then slips the tiny hook through the eye of the lock before she can think better of it.

“Scoot forward a bit,” she murmurs to Jack, sitting beside him on the mattress and putting one hand on his shoulder to help him sit up. He lifts his arms obediently as she tugs his pyjama shirt up over his head.

Elizabeth breathes in. His back is broad and pale and covered in spray of coppery freckles, the skin of his spine scraped raw from the fall. He smells like sweat and sickness but under that like Jack, like always; the urge to press her face against him is a desperate, physical thing. _I thought you were dead_ , she doesn’t tell him, grateful he can’t see her face. The words weigh like pennies at the back of her mouth.

Instead she dips the cloth in the water and runs it along the back of his neck, just lightly. Jack shivers, his whole self shuddering underneath her hands. “Are you dizzy?” Elizabeth asks, worried she’s going to have to call Faith back here after all; worried about everything, suddenly, like she’s never been before.

Jack doesn’t answer for a moment. “No,” he says quietly. “No, that’s fine.”

Elizabeth swallows and repeats the motion, then repeats it again, drawing the cloth a little ways down his back. She’s cautious of his raw spine but Jack doesn’t react, gone still and quiet under her hands, and on the fourth pass she sponges directly at the scrapes, the cloth coming away pink with dried blood. Jack hisses.

“Forgive me,” Elizabeth whispers, redirecting her attention to his sides. She’s never bathed anyone before. It's terrifyingly intimate.

“No, you’d better,” he tells her, looking back over his shoulder. The afternoon sun catches on his eyelashes, picking out each individual lash with startling clarity. His face looks like a Raphael painting but too pale, as though some celestial artist has misplaced his reds.

“All right,” Elizabeth says quietly, biting her lip. She sponges across the rest of his back as gently as she can, until the cloth stops coming away pink and his skin looks clean and white around the edges of the scrapes. “All right,” she repeats, reaching for his shoulder. “And now if you’ll just—”

He lays back down under her hands, docile. Elizabeth finds herself fascinated by his chest, the hair and the muscle under his skin and his flat brown nipples. She wants to study him like a scientific specimen. “Tell me if you’re catching cold,” she says, pressing the cloth to the top of one shoulder and reminding herself it’s rude to stare.

“I’m all right, Elizabeth,” Jack promises quietly. When Elizabeth looks at his face, his eyes are closed, lashes heavy on his cheeks.

She lets herself stare after that.

She washes his whole chest, then his arms and underneath them, where he smells sharp and animal, then finally his stomach and the thin taper of hair beneath his navel. “Can you finish the rest?” she asks when she reaches the drawstring waist of his pyjamas. “I can leave if you’d—”

Jack opens his eyes. “No, just face the other way for a moment.” Their fingers touch as he takes the cloth from her and Elizabeth blushes, her mouth suddenly dry. He's _ill_ , she reminds herself hotly, turning to stare fixedly out the window at the still-gray sky hanging low over the valley. Just yesterday morning his fingertips were _blue_.

They’re both quiet for a moment, Elizabeth’s hands clasped tightly in her lap like she can contain the nearly unbearable urge to peek that way. She thought it would be different than this, the first time she saw him unclothed.

Not that—oh, Elizabeth feels her cheeks get even warmer—not that she’s _imagined_ it, or—

“All right,” Jack says finally, a plunk as he drops the washcloth back into the basin. When she turns back around he’s smiling at her a bit sleepily, his expression bashful. “Thank you.”

Elizabeth waves him off. “Here,” she says, reaching for one of the clean undershirts Charlotte brought over. She thinks the very act of touching him has steadied her out some, made her feel less like a frantic moth flinging itself against a windowpane, only she must not be in her right mind at all, actually, because before she hands it over to him—before she can stop herself—she reaches out and fits her palm flat against his naked chest.

“Elizabeth.” Jack looks surprised, but he doesn't stop her. She can feel the reassuring tap of his heart on the other side of his skin.

“I’m sorry.” Elizabeth pulls her hand away. “I’m—”

“It’s all right.” Jack looks at her for a long moment. Neither one of them says a word. She wants to ask him if he had time to be scared as the water was rushing toward him. For some reason the expression on his face makes Elizabeth suspect the answer is yes.

“You should try to sleep,” she says finally, handing over the undershirt at last. “I’ll be right here.”

“You sleep too,” Jack murmurs, reaching up to touch her face. “I’ve been running you ragged, I expect.”

“Jack Thornton, are you saying I look wretched?” Elizabeth asks, but she smiles. “All right. I’ll sleep too.”

She forgets to unlatch the door before she climbs in the second bed, so when Abigail comes up later with tea and supper she has to knock, waking them both. “We were only resting,” Elizabeth whispers to her in an undertone as they carry the dishes back downstairs together. Her hair is mussed from the pillows and she feels the desperate need to confess, to absolve herself. She would hate for Abigail to think less of her.

“Elizabeth, darling,” Abigail says, smiling and taking her arm. “It’s all right. I expect it doesn’t matter either way now, do you? Life is very brief.”

“Yes,” Elizabeth says, swiping at her eyes. “It is.” Abigail enfolds her into a warm hug.

 

Elizabeth stays with him that night as well, tossing and turning on the narrow second bed as her corset cuts into her skin. She’s been wearing it for nearly two full days now and it’s starting to rub her raw along the boning lines, trapped sweat prickling uncomfortably along her back. Lord, she probably needs a bath herself by now, a proper one, something beyond a quick swiping at her hands and face in Abigail’s shallow washbin while Jack is asleep. She doesn’t want to repulse him.

“Are you all right?” he asks now into the dark, his voice loud and quiet all at once. Elizabeth hadn’t even known he was awake.

“Yes. No.” She sighs, sitting up and swiping a hand through her tangled hair. “No, I’m not. I’m going to latch the door and then I’m going to remove my corset, all right? I can’t sleep with it on.”

“Of course.” He’s sitting up now too, she can make out the outline of his head and shoulders in the dark. “Of course, I’m sorry, I hadn’t thought.”

Elizabeth smiles. “It’s not your fault, Jack,” she says, sliding out of bed and feeling her way over to the latch. “What could you know of corsets?”

“Not much,”Jack admits quietly, coughing a bit. “It’s been years since I wore one myself.”

That makes her laugh, the feeling of it unexpected, the sound of it too loud for the middle of the night. She doesn’t think she’s laughed at all since before it started to rain. “Fresh man,” she murmurs, turning her back and unbuttoning her borrowed dress as quickly and efficiently as possible; she’s got the thing down around her waist before she realizes she didn’t tell him to close his eyes.

She blushes into the darkness. It’s all right, she tells herself—Jack’s a gentleman, and it’s black as pitch in here, not even a moon outside. She thinks of Abigail on the staircase earlier, _I expect it doesn’t matter either way_ , and closes her mouth without a word.

She sighs a bit as the corset comes off, pleasure and relief. “That bad?” Jack asks from the bed.

Elizabeth glances over her shoulder—and he’s looking away all on his own, of course, eyes cast down at his hands on the blankets. She doesn’t know why she feels a tiny pang of disappointment. “I think I’ll live,” she says, buttoning her dress back up again.

“I think I will, too,” Jack says. Before Elizabeth can laugh he starts coughing again, that awful rattling wheeze like his ribs have shattered.

“Jack.” She’s across the room in an instant, crouched by the side of his bed. “Here, come on, sit up.” She puts a hand in the middle of his back to help him, his skin hot like a furnace through the cotton undershirt. “Do you want me to fetch Faith?”

“It’s just a cough, Elizabeth,” Jack says, gasping a little between each word. “Do _you_ want to fetch Faith?”

“If you’re sick, I do,” Elizabeth says stubbornly, but she doesn’t press, and after a while Jack quiets, curling his body forward to rest his chest on his bent knees while he catches his breath. Elizabeth rubs at his back, long soothing strokes that run the full length of his spine, the same way she pets Rip when he’s panting on a hot day. She finds herself fussing with his undershirt on each pass, rucking it up just slightly with her nails, the cotton damp and easily creased.

“Elizabeth,” Jack whispers. “What are you doing?”

She doesn’t answer, sliding her hand underneath the undershirt entirely and splaying her palm across his bare back. His skin is smooth and hot and damp, like a whetstone that is somehow also alive. “Touching you,” she murmurs finally, running just the tip of her thumb down his spine. Jack makes a soft hissing sound.

“Come here,” he says, then doesn’t even wait for her to answer, turning and hauling her up onto the bed himself. He fists a hand in the back of her dress to do it, pulling the fabric tight against her chest, and oh, Elizabeth knows he isn’t truly touching her there, but without her corset the sudden pressure feels desperately indecent. Abigail’s dress is already too small for her as is. “Elizabeth,” Jack murmurs, oblivious, curling a hand around her neck and dragging her close for a kiss. Elizabeth gasps into his open mouth.

It’s a hungry kiss, born of the darkness and the fact that it’s long past ten o’clock, teeth and tongues and faces pressed together blindly. “Wait,” Jack tries to say, the word all caught up against her mouth, “Elizabeth, I could get you sick.”

Elizabeth shakes her head. “Pneumonia’s not contagious,” she murmurs. She thinks she remembers reading that in a book somewhere and even if it’s not true she doesn’t care. She doesn’t care. She’s got both hands up the back of Jack’s undershirt now, rubbing down his sides and sliding her palms around to pet his stomach and chest, the muscles jumping underneath his skin. Lord, she never wants to stop touching him.

“ _Elizabeth_ ,” he gasps as her thumb brushes over his nipple. To her surprise she feels it stiffen up under her touch and she rubs again, curious. She thinks Jack will probably stop her—he’s always the one who stops them, and they’ve never done anything _remotely_ like this, in the dark with the door locked in a small, narrow bed—but instead he groans quietly and pulls her even closer, so that their whole fronts are touching chest to thigh. “Is that—” he asks her, breaking off without finishing the question. She can feel his steady heart thudding away behind his ribs.

Elizabeth nods into his shoulder. “I just want to be close,” she whispers before she can stop herself; it feels foolish to say but it also doesn’t cover the half of what she’s feeling, this desperate urge to unbutton her entire body and tuck him safely inside. “I want—”

“I know,” Jack says quietly, then turns his face to cough again. “Me too.”

It’s not as bad a fit as last time, but it’s enough. “Lord, Jack, you’re _sick_ ,” Elizabeth says, suddenly ashamed of herself. “This is hardly resting.”

Jack peers at her for a moment in the dark. “Do you want to stop?” he whispers, his hands sliding up and down her back. He’s investigating her, Elizabeth realises, the slope of her spine and her shoulderblades, the topography of her body so much more accessible without support garments. She forces herself to take a deep, even breath.

“You should sleep,” she says, stuttering a little over the words. “We should both—we should sleep.”

“All right.” Jack’s hands still, settling against the dip of her waist. “Wait,” he says as she starts to disentangle herself. “Would you mind terribly staying here tonight?”

Elizabeth feels her mouth drop open.

“Not like—we don’t even have to be sleeping in each other’s arms,” Jack continues in a rush. “I just meant like the first night, both of us here in this bed.” He takes a deep, sharp breath, his ribcage expanding and contracting against hers. “I apologize. I wouldn’t ask, only there’s a moment when I wake up where I still feel like I’m underwater.”

“I’ll stay,” Elizabeth says, finding her words at last. “I’ll stay, I’ll sleep in your arms, I’ll do anything you wish.” Oh, she desperately doesn’t want to cry. “ _Jack_.”

“Hush,” he whispers, touching her cheek. “It’s all right. It only lasts a moment.”

Elizabeth does cry then, hot and messy into his neck, great quaking sobs that feel like a relief, as though some horrible poison is leaving her body. Jack pets through her hair and murmurs soothing noises. After a while he maneuvers them under the sheet together and lies them down, both of their heads resting on the same narrow pillow. She thinks they must be breathing the same air.

In the morning Elizabeth wakes with the sun, the dawn sulking up pink and gray outside the window and Jack’s body fitted behind her, one arm slung heavily over her waist. This is what it would be like to be married, she thinks with some wonder, pushing her body back into his like an instinct before she catches herself and rolls over to face him.

This is what was almost swept away.

Elizabeth ignores the heavy feeling pooling in her belly, warm and loose and _lucky_ , and pushes his dark hair back off his forehead. “Jack,” she whispers in his ear to wake him. “You're safe.”

 

Elizabeth slips out after breakfast to run home and take a bath, glancing over her shoulder the whole way down the stairs and making Abigail promise twice she'll go check on him. Even halfway down the road feels too far. _We don't have to sleep in each other's arms_ , he said last night, like he was apologizing for something. Elizabeth never wants to sleep anywhere else again.

Still, the bath is a pleasure. Normally she longs for the deep soaker back at home in Hamilton but today her tiny galvanized tub feels like a luxury, hot water and the French milled soap Julie sends; Elizabeth rinses her hair out twice and scrubs the rest of herself until she feels pink and new. It's a relief to be back in her own clothes. She ties her stays looser than normal, conscious of her bruising ribs.

Faith is up in Jack’s room when she gets back there, all vim and yellow hair and sunshine, the very picture of a canary in a coal town. Elizabeth is exceedingly glad she bathed.

“Elizabeth,” Faith says brightly. “I was just telling Jack I think he'll be ready to go home tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” Elizabeth repeats, immediately aware that her first reaction sounds close to pure horror. “Already?” She's relieved, of course—of _course_ she's relieved. It all just feels awfully...quick.

“His fever’s down, and his lungs sound clearer.” Faith smiles. “He’ll need to rest and recuperate, of course, but there's no reason he can't do that at home. Really, I couldn't have asked for a better patient.”

“Of course,” Elizabeth says, glancing over at Jack. “Jack is good at anything he sets his mind to.”

Once Faith leaves, Elizabeth sinks into the chair by his bedside wordlessly, considering him. He certainly looks better, colour blooming like new roses on his cheeks and the blue circles under his eyes almost gone. “So,” she says brightly, forcing herself to smile. “That’s that.”

“That’s that,” Jack echoes, staring at her steadily. They share a look that holds something in it, something complex and fragile and _large_.

After dinner she heads home to fetch a nightdress and shawl, telling herself she might as well, telling herself it’s better than having to go through the trouble of removing her corset in the secret creep of dark. She borrows Clara’s room to undress, getting a curious look for her troubles; Jack isn’t sick enough to warrant staying the night anymore, Elizabeth knows, but she isn’t about to stop now. As she's unbuttoning her dress, removing petticoats and underslips and drawers and replacing them with a single layer of thin cotton, she finds herself thinking of tonight as their last chance.

“Elizabeth,” she hears as she’s walking back down the hall with her clothes in arms. She turns to find Faith peering at her from the bottom of the stair, her face surprised even at a distance. “I didn’t know you were staying.”

Somewhere in Faith’s voice is a hushed warning, like the whistle of a steam engine from very far off. “Just in case,” Elizabeth calls quietly, and disappears into the sickroom with a wave.

Inside, she hovers by the door for a minute, her hand on the latch. “Faith thinks I’m a loose women,” she declares finally, then slips the little hook through the lock before she can decide better of it.

When she turns she’s expecting Jack to be mortified—the notion that anyone, and Faith in particular, might think they’ve been up to anything remotely indecorous is surely anathema to him—but to her shock she finds he’s watching her calmly, his gaze dark with something she doesn’t entirely recognize. “Faith doesn’t know you like I do,” is all he says.

Elizabeth feels her breath catch inside her chest. “I guess that’s true,” she agrees, and puts the lamp out, dropping her shawl over the back of the chair. It’s chilly without it but she still finds herself hesitating a moment, fingers curled in the fabric of her nightdress. The truth is she has no intention of getting in the other bed, and she thinks they both probably know it. Still, even after everything that’s happened it feels terribly presumptuous to just climb in beside him. It feels too intentional, maybe; it feels like she’s _expecting_ —

“Elizabeth,” Jack says. His voice is so quiet. “Come here.”

Elizabeth comes. Jack holds the blankets up for her, turning onto his side so that they’re facing one another. For a moment, both of them scarcely breathe. It’s not so dark that she can’t see his expression, and as they look at each other Elizabeth feels something pass in between them, a question and an answer.

“Jack,” she whispers. Instead of kissing him she takes his hands in hers, placing one on her hip and one just underneath the curve of her breast, high enough that she’s sitting flush in the cradle of his thumb and forefinger.

“ _Elizabeth_.” He moves to cup her straight away, holding her right in the palm of his hand. “Is this—”

“Please,” Elizabeth murmurs, the way she would if he were offering to top off her cup of tea. She's fighting the sudden urge to arch her back. She can't tell if the sensation she's feeling is pleasure or simply _urgency_ , the deep elemental need for him to be doing everything to her at once; he tightens his grip and she gasps.

“Shh,” Jack whispers, and then he _grins_ at her, a naughty schoolboy grin that Elizabeth has never, ever seen on his face before. “You’ll wake the house.”

“ _Jack_!” she scolds quietly, faintly scandalized, leaning forward to muffle a giggle in the warm, salty crook of his neck. Then he turns to kiss her and Elizabeth abruptly stops laughing. She does arch now, pushing herself into his touch and reaching up to tangle her hand in the hair at the back of his neck, wanting him as close as possible. It feels like they’re a pair now, them against everyone else on the other side of the door, like everything that’s happened in the last few days has sealed them together more effectively than any wedding could. Jack sucks lightly on her bottom lip. His hand in still on her breast, squeezing rhythmically and a little too hard, but then his thumb glances over the tip and Elizabeth can't help but make a sound.

“Shh,” Jack says again, distracted. “Do you—” He does it again then, looking at her, both of them watching it harden up through her nightgown. Elizabeth squirms.

“ _Yes_.” She slides her hand down his back and then up inside his pyjama shirt, rubbing her fingertips through the hair on his chest and dragging her knuckles across his stomach, thumbing the shallow dip of his navel and curling her palm around his hip. “Do _you_?”

“Yes,” Jack says immediately, pulling her even closer. “God, you’re so _soft_.”

“Shh,” Elizabeth whispers, rubbing her nose back and forth against his jaw. He smells more like himself now, like Jack instead of the sickness. She wants to wrap herself up in it like a cloak. She drags her knuckles even lower on his stomach, running them along the waist of his pyjama bottoms. This time, Jack is the one who gasps.

“Elizabeth,” he murmurs, turning his face into hers. For a moment they just stare at each other, hungry and wide-eyed in the dark. Then Elizabeth tangles her fingers in the tie string of his trousers.

“Let me,” she says, instead of _may I?_. It leaves her lips half-command, half-plea.

“Elizabeth.” Jack’s own hands have stilled on her, one at her breast and one curled around her hip. “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” Elizabeth says, not even a pause between question and answer. It’s _Jack_ , his eyes and his mouth and his lovely broad shoulders. She would ruin herself over him. She thinks she might intend to. She intends to do all sorts of things tonight she can’t take back.

Jack watches as she works the knot with shaking fingers, both of them gasping as she slides her hand inside. She has only the faintest idea of what she's expecting but it isn't _this_ , how stiff and velvety-smooth and _hot_ he is, so much warmer than everywhere else on his body. Elizabeth runs her fingertips along the length of him, feeling out the dips and ridges. When she makes a gentle fist around him, Jack _groans_ , his hips stuttering up off the mattress. The sudden movement has his pyjama bottoms slipping lower on his hips; even in the darkness, Elizabeth can see the place where the trail of hair beneath his navel begins to widen. She can’t stop herself from reaching out and tugging the waistband further down.

Jack’s eyes fly to her face, looking faintly scandalized for the first time all night. “Elizabeth,” he starts, but she shakes her head.

“I want to _see_ you,” she says, and it sounds a lot more like pleading than she means for it to. Heaven forgive her, she wants to look and look.

Jack’s head _whoofs_ back against the pillow. “I—all right,” he says, voice cracking helplessly, and that’s when she suddenly realizes: it’s not that he’s scandalized. It’s that he’s _shy_.

Elizabeth lets go of him for a moment, filled with the urgent need to see bare skin. “Here,” she whispers, yanking his undershirt up and his pyjama bottoms down. “Here, here, here, oh Jack, please.” And then the bottoms are down and she’s looking at him at last, the swath of hair that both is and is not like her own, the tops of his thighs and his long, stiff self. He looks how he feels, curved and hard and hot.

“Elizabeth,” he whispers as she takes him in hand again. “ _Elizabeth_.” He throws an arm over his face and before Elizabeth knows what’s happening he’s arching his hips and jerking against her palm, spurts of wet splattering across his stomach. He makes a sound as it’s happening, low and caught in his throat. Even in Elizabeth’s deep confusion, that sound hooks its teeth into her lower belly and _pulls_.

“Are you—” She loosens her fist, peering down at him. “Are you all right?” Lord, she’ll be mortified if she’s hurt him somehow. He’s sick, and here she is crawling all over him like a scarlet woman.

“Yes,” Jack murmurs, pulling his arm away from his face. Even in the dark, he looks flushed. “I’m sorry, I couldn’t help it. You feel so good.”

Oh. Oh Lord so it’s _pleasure_ , it’s pleasure that has him doing that. Elizabeth throbs between her legs like a beating heart, momentarily unable to speak. Lord, she wants to part her thighs, she wants to part her thighs and _put him between them_ , she cannot believe the things she wants to do.

“Don’t apologize,” she manages finally, watching with some wonder as he pulls his undershirt all the way off and uses it to wipe the mess off his stomach, dropping it onto the floor by the bedside in an automatic sort of way that makes Elizabeth wonder if perhaps this is not the first time he’s ever cleaned up in this manner. The idea makes her stomach clench. “Please just—don't be sorry.”

Jack just looks at her for a moment, naked as a Michelangelo and twice as beautiful. “All right,” he agrees. She’s expecting him to cover himself in a hurry, but instead he gets a hand on the back of her head and tugs her down to kiss him, heat bleeding through the thin cotton and his long fingers tangled up in her hair.

“Take off your nightdress,” he says.

Elizabeth’s eyes widen, her whole body going sinfully, blissfully alert: uniformed or not, in all the time she’s known him, it’s the most commanding she’s ever heard him sound. “I—” she begins, then breaks off in dumb, thrilled shock.

Jack looks abruptly stricken. “If you want to,” he amends. “Of course, I mean—Lord, Elizabeth—”

“I want to,” Elizabeth says immediately. “I want to.” She scrambles out of the thing to demonstrate, wriggling it up over her head so fast that it somehow doesn't occur to her until it's already off that of course he’ll be able to see _her_ now, too.

“Elizabeth,” Jack whispers. He shucks his own pyjama bottoms, stripping them all the way off, and then all of a sudden both of them are naked as jaybirds, here in the inky dark of Abigail's third bedroom on a weekday evening. It isn't even so late that people have stopped moving about the house. Twice now Elizabeth has caught the creak of someone on the stair.

“Come here,” Jack murmurs, pulling her body to his. Then he pulls her _atop_ him, her legs parting on either side of his hips, and for a moment things go confused and hot and wordless, their bodies catching against one another and then freezing in place like two magnets, like something beyond either of their control. Elizabeth closes her eyes.

 

They don't. Of course they don't.

“We can't,” Jack says regretfully, easing his hips out from underneath hers and sitting up against the pillows. He’s lying soft and heavy against his thigh, Elizabeth notices, but not so soft as he was a minute ago. “Elizabeth, what if I make you with child?”

“I know.” Her knees are still on either side of his body and she chances lowering some of her weight onto him, feeling the shameful need to wriggle. She's alien-wet between her legs, she felt it when they were pressed together. She thinks she might have made a mess of him.

Jack peers up at her in the dark. “Lord, Elizabeth,” he says, smiling that boyish smile again as he reaches for her hips. “Look at you.”

Without even meaning to, Elizabeth rolls her shoulders back and pushes her chest out, wanton, her breasts lying heavy against her rib cage. “What about me?” she asks quietly, hint of a tease in her voice. Normally she’d never dream of being so bold, but oh, the way he's _gazing_ at her—

Nothing about tonight is normal, Elizabeth reminds herself. Nothing about any of this is.

“You’re beautiful,” Jack says immediately. He's touching her everywhere, restless, like he’s afraid he's going to run out of time and can't decide where to pay attention to first: breasts and belly and down between her legs, his thumb brushing over the hair in a way that makes Elizabeth shiver and arch her back. “I mean it, everything about you is just—”

“You too,” Elizabeth says, remembering his shyness from earlier. “I could look at you forever. I could _touch_ you forever, Jack, I want—” She breaks off and shakes her head, shifting her weight and pushing her wet self against his hipbone. The feeling between her legs is like pressure now, like something she needs to relieve. She _aches_. “Please don't stop,” she gasps, when he reaches up and rolls the tips of her breasts between his fingers, a pleasure that borders on pain or the other way around. He's all the way hard again, Elizabeth can see him in the darkness. Like an instinct she rubs against him with her thigh.

“ _Elizabeth_ ,” Jack gasps, too loud; Elizabeth’s hand flies to his mouth, the same way she used to muffle Julie’s giggles in church only a million times more exciting because it’s Jack and they’re adults and they’re doing _this_. She rubs her thigh against him again and he groans, muffled and buzzing against her palm.

It's not enough. It's not nearly enough and Elizabeth only dithers a moment before swinging her leg over again, bringing their hips back together. Jack’s eyes go wide.

“Elizabeth—” he warns, pulling her hand free of his mouth, but she shakes her head.

“Just like this,” she gasps. She pushes herself at him blindly, not entirely sure what she wants. Oh Lord, it feels. “Not inside.” Because he would go inside, she can tell now, her body knows where; the tip of him catches against her for a minute and she stops breathing altogether, the need to push onto him so physical and bodily it’s almost astounding. She forces herself to lift off again, readjusting.

Jack reaches down between them to help, his knuckles brushing against her as he tilts himself up towards his belly. “Carefully,” he whispers. “Oh Lord, Elizabeth, be careful.”

“Yes.” They’ve fit him into the seam of her body somehow and it feels so good Elizabeth has to stop wriggling for a moment or she’ll make a noise. But then Jack reaches for her bottom to pull her against him and she gasps anyway, dropping forward to bury the sound in his neck. She’s made him so slippery that both of them covered with it, the length of him sliding along her flesh. Elizabeth pushes her hips at his again and whimpers, helpless against the feeling.

“Oh,” Jack says, sounding faintly astonished. “Here, wait, let me—” He reaches up to cover her mouth with one hand, keeping the other on her bottom, holding her in place. Then he pulls her close again, only this time he moves his hips too and suddenly they’re moving _together_ , rocking, their breathing speeding up in time. Elizabeth has never felt anything even approximating the sensation between her legs before. She whimpers against his palm and rocks harder, trying in vain to calm down. His skin tastes like salt and heat.

“You have to lift up when I say,” Jack gasps in her ear. “All right? Elizabeth. You must.”

Elizabeth nods but she doesn’t want to at all, she never wants to stop doing this. His body is so warm and so close and so good. The feeling between her legs is growing bigger and more urgent; she's chasing the pleasure like a butterfly in a field, getting closer and closer until almost, _almost_ —

“ _Now_ , Elizabeth.”

Elizabeth whines, first in alarm and then in abject frustration as Jack boosts her right up off his body; she peers down in between them, watching as he spends himself across his belly once more. The sight of it is oddly hypnotic, distracting enough that for a brief moment Elizabeth nearly forgets the desperate sensation between her own legs.

Then Jack looks up at her in the darkness, and abruptly she remembers.

“Jack,” Elizabeth whispers, half frantic with need now and helpless to communicate it. “ _Jack_ —”

Jack curls a hand around the back of her neck, squeezing roughly. She can’t imagine he knows what she’s after—Elizabeth herself isn’t even sure what she’s after—but the fact that she’s after _something_ must be written all over her face because he pulls her back down on top of him on the mattress, settling her right against the broad, hard length of his thigh. “Use me,” he whispers in her ear, so quietly she barely even hears him. “Whatever you want, just—”

Elizabeth gasps and presses herself against him greedily, too overwrought to be ashamed. She’s making a mess of both of them but she doesn't care, wound tight like a toy top before its first spin. She's single-minded, hot in pursuit, but oh, of _what?_

“Elizabeth,” Jack whispers, holding her to him, clasping at her arms and her hips by turns. Then he pulls at her thighs, yanking her even tighter against him, wider somehow, and suddenly Elizabeth can't keep her voice down at all because oh, what _is_ that, how can it possibly feel so good? Jack presses her face into his neck.

“Shh,” he whispers. “Like that?”

Elizabeth nods and rocks harder, the string in her belly winding tighter and tighter until suddenly it snaps, pleasure catching and blooming between her legs like a piece of tinder going up in flames. She's so surprised she cries out.

“ _Hush_ ,” Jack hisses, but he's laughing, both of his arms around her waist. He presses a kiss against her temple.

Elizabeth pauses to catch her breath for a moment, shocked beyond all imagination. Oh, she had no idea that could happen, it felt so unspeakably wonderful. “Jack,” she says, wanting to tell him but not knowing the words. “Jack, Jack, that felt—”

“Good?” he supplies. Elizabeth nods but somehow it's more than that, seeking and finding, the thrill of the chase, lassitude and wanting and relief. Already she wants to do it again.

“I love you,” she says instead, looking down at the mess on his belly and his spent wet self, his sticky thigh where she's still resting. “Jack, oh, I really do, I love you more than anything.”

“I love you too,” he says immediately, his voice low and serious. Elizabeth rests her sleepy head on his chest. 


End file.
